Have you ever caught yourself comparing your financial journey to someone else’s? Maybe you’ve felt like you’re just not “good with money” because others seem to have it figured out. This shame traps you in a cycle of avoidance and keeps you stuck in unhealthy financial choices that hold you back from meeting your goals.
In today’s episode, I explain reflection shame, how it might show up for you, and why a fixed mindset is keeping you from making progress in regaining control of your finances. I discuss how to break free from shame and the impulse to compare yourself to other people. Then, I give you actionable steps to help you shift your mindset and start aligning your spending and financial habits with what you want to do with your goals.
Whether your goal is saving, paying down debt, or just learning to track your spending, today’s episode teaches you the tools to stop comparing and start growing.
Listen for key insights on reflection shame…
- [01:00] Ways shame might show up for you
- [04:56] How a fixed mindset is keeping you stuck
- [20:14] Steps to shift your reflection shame
Tune into this episode of Money Files to learn how to shift your reflection shame so you can stop comparing your finances to others and begin establishing financial security.
Are you ready to start asking for help with your finances? Apply to work with me, and let’s start working towards your financial goals.
If you loved the discussion about reflection shame, check out my episode, The Power of Micro Habits for Financial Success!
Transcript for “How To Stop Comparing Your Financial Journey To Others”
Intro: Hi, and welcome to Money Files. I’m Keina Newell from Wealth Over Now. I work every day with professional women and solopreneurs to help them get out of financial overwhelm and shame so they can experience more flexibility and ease with their finances. Are you ready to gain confidence and learn to manage your finances intentionally? Tune in and grab financial tips that will help you master the way you think about and manage your finances.
Keina: Hello and welcome back to another episode of Money Files. I’m excited that you’re here today and I want to actually dive in to a topic that I’m calling Reflection Shame. And you might be like, Keina, what is that? The way that I hear it, when clients talk to me or prospective clients talk to me, they are generally comparing their finances to someone else’s. And it sounds like my parents are good with money, but I don’t know why I’m so bad at money. Or my sister is good with money and I’ll never be as good as her. Or, I’m the only one in my friend group that doesn’t understand money. Those are some of the examples that I would call reflection shame. And the reason I call it reflection shame is because you don’t like what you see about your financial situation. When you compare where you are financially to your friends, your siblings, your parents, or even your coworkers, and shame when it’s present, especially with your finances or any area of your life, it’ll keep you stuck.
And the way that presents is, you’re not able to check your bank account because there’s no use in checking your bank account. You already know you’ve overdrawn or you don’t have any money in there. So you can’t even get yourself to think about that point in which you are someone who checks your bank account. So that keeps you stuck. Or maybe you have a goal, you think it sounds really nice to save money, but you remind yourself all the time that when I’ve tried to save money in the past it didn’t work. And so now I’m just like, I’m just going to wing it and I’m going to figure it out. You’re just like hopeful that it’ll all fall into place. Or when it comes to asking for help, you might think about the fact that you are so far gone that nobody can help you with your financial situation, like that’s one of the thoughts that you have. Or even when you start to think about help, like you don’t want to think about help because then everyone is going to know that you don’t have it all together.
Or maybe when it comes to paying off your debt, you have tried and now you’re right back in the same situation. And so these are some of the reasons in which you experience shame, but they’re also the reasons that you stay stuck because of how you talk to yourself about the things that you don’t have in comparison to the people that you are comparing yourself to, like your parents, your coworkers, your siblings. And so that is reflection shame. Reflection shame will keep you stuck. And that shame is a really big, big, big, big, loudspeaker in your life that basically says you are not good enough when it comes to making your money.
And so that loudspeaker, it makes the skill of being good with money, something that seems fixed, like how am I going to get this? How is it that my sister has the skills but I can’t get it? My parents have it, but I can’t acquire the skills. So it’s like not something that you feel is attainable for you, and shame is stopping you from actually developing a growth mindset with your money. And not having a growth mindset with your money means you’re not able to start or even put yourself in a space to learn because you want to hide. Shame will also make you miss wins in your financial journey because while you’re in the process of learning about your money, shame will come in and tell you, see, you’re not getting it. I told you, you overspend on your groceries. You can’t do this, even though you are actually making progress because three or four weeks ago you didn’t even know that you should look at your groceries and how much you’re spending.
So shame can make you ignore your non-budget victories. I have another episode on non-budget victories if you want to learn more about that. But it’s very important to call out the shame in your life and recognize that we want to have a growth mindset when it comes to our money. Years ago, I read a book by Carol Dweck and it’s called Mindset. And I pulled one of the quotes because I love this quote from her. And it says, in the fixed mindset, everything is about the outcome. If you fail or if you’re not the best, it’s all been a waste. The growth mindset allows people to value what you’re doing regardless of the outcome. They’re tackling problems, charting new courses, working on important issues. Maybe they haven’t found the cure for cancer, but the search was deeply meaningful.
I think that this is so important to think about how does your fixed mindset about money, about whether or not you have it, whatever it may be in your life and how is that keeping you stuck? Because really it’s the shame that you have in your life that’s keeping you stuck. It’s the shame that is telling you it’s not good enough that you’ve saved $10 because you should have a thousand saved. It’s not good enough that you’ve only paid off one credit card because you shouldn’t have any debt. And so when you’re going through this process of becoming someone who knows how to manage their money well, we really want to adopt this growth mindset because it’s going to allow us to find value in the process regardless of the outcome.
I was just talking to a client this week and when she came to me, she was really, really stressed about her finances. She’s a realtor and she was like, Keina, I need to to pay my taxes. I haven’t paid my taxes. Like I find in the winter months, I am using my credit card because I don’t have money to pay myself because I don’t have home closings. So that’s the situation she was in at first. And with us being able to work together over the last five months, we were reflecting this week over the things that she’s able to do now that she wasn’t able to do, like she wouldn’t have been able to do a year ago because of the fact that the process that I walked her through has taught her to be more reflective about her finances. So one of the things she was saying is she said, Keina this weekend, it was a holiday weekend, and she said, Keina, I didn’t spend any money. I looked and I wanted to, I’m always talking about wanting to update my house and I looked at furniture, but I was able to catch myself that I was trying to buy my happiness and I was able to talk to myself and realized that spending $2,000 was not going to buy my happiness.
Before working with me, she never would’ve been able to catch the win that’s in seeing how she thinks about her purchasing decisions as a win. If she was just focused on how much money do I have in the bank, how much debt have I paid off, how much money have I saved? She wouldn’t be able to catch her own thought process because it’s that thought process that makes managing your money well becomes something that’s sustainable. Also, as we were talking, she was saying, early on when we started working together, Keina, I would think about when I couldn’t spend money as being much more like restrictive and that I was being strict with myself, but now I’m actually able to have a different conversation about how I’m spending my money intentionally or I know that I want to actually spend it on experiences.
So spending money in this way right now isn’t something that I want to do, not because I can’t, it’s because I don’t value it. So this five month coaching program has shaped that internal conversation within her. But I’m talking about this because if you have a fixed mindset and you’re just focused on the numbers of what’s going on, or you don’t have someone like a financial coach who can reflect back to you the shifts in your own thinking and the way that you’re being and your actions, you can miss the progress that you’re making because shame can be really loud, especially when you’re close to something that you once feared in the past, like an unexpected expense or a bill that catches you off guard or maybe if you had to use your credit card, shame can be really loud until you see you don’t have it right and this is why you’re never going to be good at managing your money.
But when you actually work with a coach, you’re going to be equipped with a different set of skills that are going to allow you to see like, okay, I can see this as being very neutral and actually, there’s nothing wrong here. Nothing has gone wrong. I had an unexpected expense, but I actually know how to move through this instead of hide from it. Shame causes you to hide. Coaching is going to allow you to move through, and that’s what we want you to do, is to be able to move through. The other thing that shame can do is it can convince you that financial success is for everyone but you. I think this is a very classic example of a fixed mindset. So you’re either good with money or you’re not. This last week I was actually talking to a friend and she was telling me like, I don’t know how people save money.
I mean, I didn’t really comment on this, but it was almost as though she had like given up on the idea that she could become a saver. You might be in a similar place where you’re like, yeah, I don’t get how people save money. It sounds really good in theory, but I can’t. And this is an example of reflection shame, like you’re comparing yourself to people that can save. And it may be people you know, it could be people that you don’t even know. It’s like the rest of the world versus you. And so instead of saving money, you just proceed to maintain and I’ll figure it out mentality. So you’re always going to maintain your status quo and you’re not really going to figure out anything because you’re not giving yourself an opportunity to start small.
I want you to give yourself an opportunity to start small. And an example of that might be, I’m going to save $20 a month, or I’m going to save $100 a month. I need you to celebrate that as though you’re saving a thousand dollars a month. I need you to celebrate that as though you’re saving $5,000 a month. I don’t need you to compare yourself to like Susie Joe down the street because this ain’t got nothing to do with Susie. This is about you. This is about you showing yourself, look at this, I’m a saver. I’m saving $20 a month. I’m doing something that I couldn’t do 30 days ago. I’m saving a hundred dollars a month. I’m doing something I couldn’t do 30 days ago. And that makes it meaningful, that makes it purposeful. And when you feed that type of mentality within yourself, what’s going to happen is you are going to feed a growth mindset about being a saver, because that will just be something that you say that you are and it’ll become something that you do and you’ll get better and better and better at it over time.
But the most important part is that you have to start somewhere. And with my clients, that’s the thing that I’m showing them. It’s like, how do we start with you saving money? I had another client and he’s like, Keina, I have money in four accounts. We were just looking at his numbers this week and he’s like, I have $5,000 and there are like three weeks I didn’t work and I never had $5,000 beforehand. And it’s because we’ve been able to get him to lean in to where he has that discomfort and where he thinks he couldn’t do things and just starting small. And his small steps have created $5,000. He almost has like a five figure account. And I know we’ll have a five figure account before this year is over where he’s just going to be able to trust that he’s always going to have money because before working with me, he would just like throw money at his bills, just trying to get him paid off because that’s what he had been trained to do in order to be good with his money.
Now he’s safe with his money and he’s able to sleep better at night. Shame also can keep you stuck. I’ve talked about this already. It doesn’t allow you to change your habits because you think you’re incapable of improvement. So instead of trying something different or even trying again, because maybe you tried over and over again, you’re listening to me, you’re like, Keina, I’ve tried this and it didn’t work. Keina I tried that and it didn’t work. Shame will keep you stuck in telling you like, yeah, I tried and it didn’t work, and I’m here to tell you guess what, girl, you need to pick up your bag and you got to try again, because you may have tried, but maybe this is the time that it sticks. I don’t want you to give up on yourself because shame is telling you that you are just in a place that this is permanent and that it is fixed because that’s not true.
That shame is just reinforcing the belief that you’re bad with money. And that’s not true. That is fundamentally not true. You can shift how you manage and how you spend money, how you think about money, how you save, how you pay off debt. You can shift all of those things. That’s not a fixed thing. Relational shame is the reason your head is in the sand and it makes you avoid your numbers and you’re not getting the help that you need. But I also want to let because this is what you don’t know, those people that you’re comparing yourself to, they’re not better than you. They just have decided to fail more times than you have.
Most people that I talk to about money who are perceived to be like good with money, they’ve all had an ha ha moment where their finances like shifted and they had that uphill trajectory. So just think about the fact that they’ve been willing to be frustrated, they’ve been willing to try more than you. So maybe you need to try two more times. Maybe you are two times away from really having that uphill trajectory with your money. What if that’s true for you? And I believe it is. And it may not even be two more times, it could be one more time, especially when you work with a coach like myself, because I can point out to you and say like, Hey, here’s actually what’s going on with your money. Or tell me about how you were feeling last week when you were spending. Because for me as a coach, I know that how you’re managing your money, it’s not just about adding and one plus two equals three. There are other things that get in the way that you don’t know.
You’re like Keina, it was warm outside, I need to go to happy hour. Or I had a really bad day at work and I found myself buying myself things. So we can talk about that and actually help you overcome those things so that way you know how to have your own back when things don’t feel like they’re balanced for you. Or when things feel stressful in your life, that’s why you want to hire a coach because you’ll have that accountability and support. The coach isn’t there to tell you what you can’t do. The coach is to help you see what you can do. So even telling you about these people that you think are perfect with money, even maybe you think that I am perfect with money, which I’m not. The thing that I’m good at with my money is being able to manage my thoughts and my feelings about my money.
In my twenties, I learned a lot about my finances. I definitely had gotten into debt, I had credit card balances, and I definitely carried debt longer than any, Dave Ramsey would have told me to go sit down and not go do anything because that’s his philosophy. But the difference between you and me when it comes to my thoughts about debt is that I didn’t make it mean anything about me. I didn’t shut down. I didn’t start comparing myself to my parents and being like, oh my goodness, like, my parents don’t have any debt and I’m never going to be good with money because my parents, like I didn’t do any of that. I wasn’t comparing myself to anyone.
I definitely named for myself that like the debt sucked, but I gave myself compassion and I learned from my debt. My debt taught me what I needed to save for. My debt helped me actually think more intentionally about how do I want to spend money in ways that are really valuable? Like my debt situation, it helped me also earn more money because when I was thinking about what are the reasons I’m in debt, what would it look like to actually afford the things that I want to be able to afford? It had me make a dream budget and it had me ultimately find ways to increase my income. I had bold conversations with my boss about why would I want to switch from being a teacher to a vice principal if the pay is the same? I had a purpose for money in my life. I knew exactly how much money I wanted to make, I knew what I’d be using that money for, and I made moves to get me into a position to actually earn more money.
And then I also started to think about, okay, I know I want to be someone who is a saver, like I want to save more money, like that is a goal for me. And so there are times in my life that I’ve only been able to save $25 a month or $50 a month. So when I’m telling you to do that, I know that’s a good habit for you to build because I know it can also turn into you saving a thousand dollars a month over time, especially when that’s something that you’re prioritizing in your life. Because you becoming a saver does not mean that you have to save X amount of dollars. A saver could be someone who’s saving $20 a month because like I said, that $20 can turn into $500, can turn into a thousand. So I know shame can feel really heavy and I know it can be hard looking at others and thinking you should be able to figure it out or that you’ll never compare.
But I want you to know above all things that you are worthy of financial security. No matter who you are or where you’re starting, you’re worthy of financial security. I hope that today is a new day for you. I hope that you will be like, Keina, you have called out and identified something within me and you’re shining a light on this reflection shame. I want to take a step forward and I want to do something different. I mean, I hope the step you do take is to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership because you’re going to get that accountability and support. So you can tell your shame like, Hey, guess what? I’m actually really worthy of success. And we’ll be able to build you a budget. We’re going to go through your numbers and actually look at what’s factual. We can use my Magic 10 process to create your five figure savings account.
We are going to be able to help you build a dialogue to talk back to your shame, because shame might pop its head up, to be like, Hey, you are not doing the right thing. But when you’re able to recognize it and you’re able to speak back to it and call it out and name it for what it is, you are going to be able to see what happens with your finances as something that’s neutral and not something that you always feel like you need to be combative with. So let me just give you a couple things to actually shift your reflection shame. So the first thing I want you to do is I want you to highlight your growth. I want you to think about a time when you could have easily compared yourself to others, but you chose to grow instead.
And this doesn’t have to be something that is money related. I think it can be helpful to go outside of the money and think about a time in your life when you could have compared yourself to others, but you chose to grow instead. So maybe it was getting a promotion at work, maybe it was deciding to start your own business. Maybe you were going back to school for another degree, or maybe you were learning a new skill you once thought was difficult. Like what is it that you could have compared yourself to others, but you chose to grow instead? So your brain needs to be reminded of who you are and being able to highlight your growth is going to remind your brain of who you are and that you know how to figure out hard things.
And if you know how to figure out hard things in other areas of your life, maybe it’s in relationships or it’s with your career, it’s within education, if you can figure out hard things in other areas of your life, you can figure out hard things when it comes to your finances.
So that’s the first thing. So define and highlight areas of growth. Then I want you to actually define what it means to be good with money. Ask yourself, like, what would it look like for me to be good with money? Because we’re talking about reflection shame. I don’t want you to be using someone else’s picture. I need you to be using your picture. What does it look like for you to be good with money? What it looks like for Keina to be good with money might not be the same thing that it looks like for you to be good with money. And I would even break it down even further. What would it look like for you to be good with money in the next week? What would that look like? What would it look like for you to be good with money in the next 30 days?
What would it look like for you to be good with money in the next six months, in the next year? I’m thinking about what it would look like to be good with money in the next week. Maybe it’s like, you know what, I’m going to sit down and I’m going to write a grocery list. That’s what it would look like for me to be good with money in the next week. Because maybe you want to shift how much money you’re spending on going out to eat or maybe in the next week if you want to be good with money, you are like, I’m going to check my bank account everyday. I just want to check my bank account and see what’s coming in and coming out. That’s what it could look like to be good with money. Once again, you don’t need to compare yourself to anyone else because this is a baby step for you that’s going to lead to another step and it’s going to lead to another step that is going to encourage you to be better with money.
So that’s what I want you to identify. And then I want you to shift from, I’m bad with money, to I’m learning to manage my money in a way that works for me. So give yourself that space to learn. Give yourself that space to grow. Give yourself that space to be like, oops, okay, that wasn’t what I wanted to do. Let me choose something better. Let me choose the next big step. I want you to notice that I am trying to support you in identifying where you are right now because you are comparing yourself to someone who might be 10,000 days into this process. I want you to find out, guess what, where am I on day one and where do I want to be on day 30? And where do I want to be on day 180? Like that’s what I want you to figure out.
So it might look like in 30 days you’re paying all your bills on time. It might look like in six months that you have $3,000 saved, but it’s taking the time to define success for you is going to provide you with a benchmark against yourself so that you’re able to push yourself against you. I want you to be the example. I don’t want anybody else to be the example for you. And then lastly, I want you to take small steps toward change. So I want you to pick one area of your finances to focus on. I have another great episode on this called Micro Habits. And I want you to pick a small step. I want you to celebrate your wins. Like maybe you’re going to track your spending for a week. Maybe you want to create a budget, maybe you want to recognize progress instead of waiting for perfection.
And so what are the small steps that you want to track?
What’s the micro habit that you want to build this year that you can come back in and celebrate and know that you’re actually making progress towards your goals? So that’s today’s episode. But if today’s episode resonated with you, I would invite you to apply to work with me in my five month coaching partnership. Having a coach to support you through your shame cycles can help you make progress faster because you’ll get that accountability and support when you feel your shame is making you want to hide. So if you go to my show notes, you’ll see the application there to apply or if you go to my website, you’ll also see that you can apply to work with me there. Thank you. And until next time, have a great week.
Outro: Thank you so much for listening to Money Files. If you’re ready to take the next step to reach your financial goals, head to www.wealthovernow.com/appointment and let’s get started.
